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If someone tells you that your website stinks, my advice is to ask them first if it is a good scent or a bad scent and what they thought of the scent quality. You may get an odd look in return, but eventually they will realize you aren't joking. But what scent does a website have? How could a website have a smell? Well, this scent is not a smell that is detected with the nose; it is an information scent, based on our mental associations between concepts.
In an information space like the Web, the goal is to get from one place to another, from here to there. The Web is vast, however, and spatial notions of up and down, right and left do not apply. About the only movements possible on the Web are from general to specific (when browsing through a website hierarchy), from one website to another following a link, or direct access using a search engine. In all these cases, but especially when browsing, visual and verbal cues are required to let us know that we are on the right path to the desired information. These cues are the pieces of information scent that we are following, and we choose the cues with the best likelihood (the strongest scent) of getting us to the desired destination.
An example will help clarify how information scent functions in our use of the Web. Perhaps you are visiting an e-commerce website that carries a wide variety of products. Your interest is in purchasing a movie in DVD format. Looking at the navigation bar for the website, you notice a number of different labels for the links. One link is labeled "Films," which seems more closely related to your desired item than the links labeled "Music" or "Software." In this situation the scent is stronger for the "Films" link, because conceptually that term is closer to the DVD movie than the other two labels. If you were interested in buying a movie soundtrack, though, the decision is not as easy to make. This problem arises because both "Films" and "Music" seem plausible labels. The scent is no longer distinctive. Which path should you choose?
Exploring Scent
Much of the work on information scent has...